If Google refuses to display your ugly, keyword-stuffed title in its SERPs–but it still gives your page credit for having keyword in the title–then the time-consuming task of balancing SEO-friendly and User-friendly just got a helluva lot easier, didn’t it?

It’s possible that Google completely ignores character counts now and only cares about the rendered width. To test whether or not this is true, I’ve used a title and meta description on this page that consist mostly of pipe characters.